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In his mold: Timothy Cardinal Dolan with the pope after getting his red biretta last year. With pal John Paul II, Benedict picked most current cardinals. Photo: Getty Images

The instant Pope Benedict XVI announced his retirement, the American media went into politics mode — and got even that wrong.

And not just the horse-race angle about who might succeed the German-born Josef Ratzinger, 85, a fierce defender of Catholic theology known around the Vatican as God’s Rottweiler.

No, the focus instead was on whether the church — despite centuries of fidelity to a well-defined set of moral precepts — will take this opportunity to “expand its appeal” by compromising its teachings on birth control, homosexuality and divorce.

And, given the church’s decline in Europe but its dramatic rise in the Third World, whether the next pope would better “represent” the demographic shift if he were black or Hispanic.

Translation: Will the Catholic Church finally start imitating the Democratic Party? Why not?

First prize for fatuousness goes to The New York Times, which reported: “The resignation sets up a struggle between the staunchest conservatives, in Benedict’s mold . . . and those who believe that the church can broaden its appeal in small but significant ways, like allowing divorced Catholics who remarry without an annulment to receive communion or loosening restrictions on condom use in an effort to prevent AIDS.”

Ah, no. The “staunchest conservatives, in Benedict’s mold” pretty much describes the entire College of Cardinals these days. After all, Benedict and his close friend, John Paul II, chose every new cardinal for the last four decades.

The quiet, intellectual Benedict was the exact opposite of his charismatic Polish predecessor JPII, now being fast-tracked to sainthood — but on matters of faith and morals, they were indistinguishable.

That’s one reason why (beyond his German background) the secular US press has always hated Ratzinger. Appointed prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in 1981 by Pope John Paul II, he enforced orthodoxy in Catholic precepts — rejecting the relativistic notion, for example, that Christ was just one master among many, and insisting that true salvation can only be found within the Catholic Church.

But nothing makes lefties madder than Benedict’s deaf ear toward their petulant insistence that the Church “modernize” — in other words, destroy the moral foundation of the world’s longest surviving institution.

It never seems to occur to the critics that the church’s explosive growth outside Europe and North America is precisely due to the steadfastness of its moral teachings — and that its decline in the West is a result of a loss of faith in those very principles among intellectuals. (You see the same decline in Reform Judaism and liberal Protestantism.)

As then-Cardinal Ratzinger observed of the Vatican II liberalizing reforms, they “seem to have passed over from self-criticism to self-destruction.”

In any case, trying to understand the Catholic Church through the prism of contemporary US politics is a fool’s errand.

Popes routinely infuriate American political conservatives, for example, with their withering criticisms of capitalism’s inequities and its effects on the poor. At the same time, they draw the line on such lefty talking points as gay marriage and abortion.

What the critics don’t realize is that the Church is simply being consistent. At root, Catholic theology is concerned with the fundamental nature of human beings and their place in God’s plan — a plan not subject to change at the whim of the electorate or the urging of editorial pages.

The next pope has his work cut out for him, especially in combatting the decline of the Church in the West just as it faces mortal peril from the rise of Islam in what used to be Christendom. He needs to be young and strong, as John Paul II was, and unafraid to confront evil. He needs to be a man of faith.